Or, how I learned to love
worrying and stop the bomb
Ken Adelman, Reagan at Reykjavik:
Forty-eight hours that ended the Cold War.
Broadside Books. 2014.
It was a close shave.
At the end of their October 1986
summit in Iceland,
President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev nearly pulled
off the impossible. “It would be fine
with me if we eliminated all nuclear weapons,” Reagan blurted.
“We can do that,” said
Gorbachev. “We can eliminate them.”
“If we can agree to eliminate all
nuclear weapons, I think we can turn this over to our Geneva folks with that understanding, for
them to draft up an agreement. Then you
can come to the US
and sign it.”
“Well, all right. Here we have a chance for an agreement.”
Then the euphoria disappeared.
“It is incomprehensible,” said
Gorbachev, warming to his favorite theme, “why research, development, and
testing of SDI should go on and not
be confined to the laboratories.” He was
referring to the Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan’s proposal to base in
outer space a system to shoot down missiles.
Reagan warmed to his favorite response. “I have promised the American people I would not give up SDI.” And
that was the end of that.
Why did they fail to connect?
Neither leader – much
less their staffs – was prepared for the radical step. Each might have felt pushed by the other to
the political brink. Reagan would have
had to fetter his beloved Star Wars system.
Gorbachev would have had to give up the Soviet Union’s advantage in
ballistic missiles in Europe and Asia.
The summit was not a waste
of time. The two sides came to better
understand each other. The US agreed to
extend the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty for a decade. But it would not consign the SDI to the lab – Gorbachev’s condition for deep cuts in
arms. So the elimination of
intermediate-range missiles in Europe came off
the table. Adelman, Reagan’s adviser on arms
control, recalled telling reporters that “the prevailing narrative – that SDI
sank the summit – was wrong. It was
Gorbachev who sank the summit – by tying SDI to nuclear cuts.”
Like most spins, this was only
half right. The Americans and the
Soviets expected too much of one another.
“While [Eduard] Shevardnadze sought to eliminate all strategic weapons,
[George] Shultz sought to scrap only strategic ballistic missiles,” Adelman
writes of the exchange between the two foreign ministers. “This formulation left America’s two
strengths – strategic bombers and cruise missiles – outside the ban, and put
the Soviets’ main strength – ballistic missiles – inside it, on the chopping
block.”
Perhaps the two sides were too evenly
matched. They found it hard to come up
with concessions that could not have left one side stronger than the other. Since the two antagonists would not upset the
delicate balance, history would have to do the honors for them, in the form of
the Soviet Disunion. --Leon Taylor tayloralmaty@gmail.com
